Have you ever wanted to create a new initiative in your library, but weren’t sure where to start? How can we make our plans fit the needs of our community, get investment, create involvement throughout our organization, and make it all pay off?

On this show, we talk with Sari Feldman, Executive Director of Cuyahoga County Public Library. Under her leadership, the system received the highest overall score among America’s largest metropolitan library systems in Library Journal’s Index of Public Library Service for many years running. Sari served as Past President for both the American Library Association and the Public Library Association.

She shares the ways in which she started a meaningful initiative for her community called, the Reconnect with Reading Campaign. It’s a successful example we all can use as we kick off initiatives of our own. It will also speak to the readers-heart in each of us. Thank you for tuning in.

Full Transcript

This podcast is brought to you by the School of Library and
Information Management from Emporia State University, where library leaders are
created – with program sites in Kansas, Utah, Oregon, Colorado, and South
Dakota. And, by the Park City Library making film and podcasting possible with
green screen, and sound recording resources.

Have you ever wanted to create a new initiative in your
library but weren’t sure where to start? How can we make our plans fit the
needs of our community, get investment, create involvement throughout our
organization, and make it all pay off?

On this show, we talk with Sari Feldman, Executive Director
of Cuyahoga County Public Library. Under her leadership, the system received
the highest overall score among America’s largest metropolitan library systems
in Library Journal’s, Index of Public
Library Service for many years running. Sari served as past president for
both the American Library Association and the Public Library Association. She
shares the ways in which she started a meaningful initiative for her community
called, the Reconnect with Reading
Campaign. It’s a successful example we can all use as we kick off
initiatives of our own. It will also speak to the reader’s heart in each of us.
Thank you for tuning in.

Isn’t it? I think we all feel that way. Today we are going
to talk about a reading initiative in your library system called Reconnect with
Reading. I know this was implemented based on research about important positive
outcomes correlated with frequent reading. Can you tell us about that?

Sure. In 2007 the National Endowment for the Arts started a
regular study on the state of literacy in America. At that time they identified
that there was a decline in the number of American adults reading literature
and reading for pleasure. We decided to take a look at Cuyahoga County Public
Library Service District and what our own community thought about reading and
the pleasure of reading.

We also were concerned about the fact that the report
revealed the strong correlation between frequent reading, and professional and
academic success, civic engagement, and physical health. Since we believe that
libraries are a center of community life, where we provide individual
opportunity and community progress, we needed to make sure that we were still
creating readers and supporting readers.

In Cuyahoga County, we actually have a fairly low level of
education attainment. We are below the national average in the number of people
who graduate from high school and well below the national average in the number
of people who go on to college.

So, we thought that by encouraging reading and ensuring that
people are both skilled at reading, but also want to read, find value in the
activity of reading, that we could start to move the dial on education in
Cuyahoga County. We really began to emphasize books and reading as a library
brand. It fit with me personally, because I’m a reader.

I’m a reader too. I love books and we want to share that
with our communities. It sounds like in your community this is a huge
initiative that was very important to the people you serve. So, in implementing
this program can you describe the leadership and the impetus behind the
Reconnect with Reading campaign?

We used data, the national poll, and then the comparison in
Cuyahoga County to really explain to our board the value of this initiative. They
made a significant investment by allowing us to contract with Nancy Pearl,
America’s, the librarian’s librarian.

…to come to Cuyahoga County one week a month and to
actually train our staff on this Reconnected Reading Initiative. She came to us
one week a month for ten months and she embedded the skills of Leaders Advisory
into our staff competencies and made that something very important about the
way we serve customers.

Through that effort, we began to develop certain programs.
We have a Facebook discussion after hours. We do online readers’ advisory. We
increased our Book Club offerings, and we also became a place where we were
known to bring authors. Today we will have between 75 and 100 authors -national
and local authors, come to the library for events. We have a staff member who
the majority of his job is actually dedicated to working with New York
publishers to bring those authors to our community. We work very collaborative
with not only publishers but with other libraries, local colleges,
universities, bookstores, and community organizations to really deliver on
these author events. It’s been something that the public has both come to
expect and also to be absolutely thrilled to participate in at the library.

We recently hosted Mitch Albom and Jodi Picoult to name two
people who had events that were available for the public to attend. I want to
mention also that we are very attentive not just to the pleasure of reading,
but the skill of reading. We actually have tutoring for children who are at
risk of failing what in Ohio, is the third-grade reading test. And, we have an
adult basic literacy program that then flows into our GED program for adults in
this community who really never learned to read or never became skilled at the
act of reading.

Thanks. It’s just that it’s a natural evolution for us
because we’re a very busy library system. We see ourselves now as places of
learning and we think reading is the most basic of all the learning that needs
to happen in libraries.

In managing change and leading an initiative like this,
there’s a great deal of leadership and commitment across all levels of an
organization that needs to take place. So, how did you make this happen, and
what can you recommend for libraries and librarians who want to kickstart
similar initiatives?

So, I was very present. People knew I loved to read and I
personally attended trainings, I participated in our staff book club. Everyone
in Cuyahoga County Public Library reads the same book, and that was a staff
initiative. Our first one was Citizen
Vince by Jess Walter. Then, I began to actually promote what I was reading.
I went on public radio and talked about what I was reading. I sent emails and
wrote in the staff newsletter about what I was reading, not in ego to say, Well
I’m the director of the library and I do all this reading. But, to be that face
of the library of a reading place. It attracted a great deal of attention. It
was incredibly successful. Then the board, as I said, invested in bringing
Nancy Pearl to the library system, and invested in this staff position that we
now have that enables us to connect with New York top publishers.

We also did a very visible marketing campaign that included
billboards, and posters. and palm cards. Actually, we wrapped city buses with
our Connected Reading message. That was just so visible that we were investing
in our message about reading.

Absolutely, it sounds like it went through all levels of the
organization: staff initiatives; promotion; communication; board investment
visibility; and a real investment top-to-bottom, side-to-side which is great.
How has your commitment to this initiative paid off?

I’m very proud that reading is still 60% of our circulation.
We talk about circulation of materials is reading, listening, viewing, and
playing because we have a toy library. Reading can be of all kind, but it has
been a very strong part of our service.

I think we also have fantastic outcomes from our instruction
in the library. About 80% of the students who participate in our 1-2-3 Read tutoring program, get on
grade level at the library. We know that attendance for our author programs has
expanded exponentially. People come to expect and participate in those events.

And, finally, our foundation has grown so much stronger
because of our public image, the public presence that reading plays. I found
that donors are really inspired by the idea that even as libraries change and
transform, and technology has become an important piece of the service
delivery, that we still maintain that core value around books and reading. Because
of that, we’ve found that some of the most philanthropic people in Cuyahoga
County are willing to contribute to the library.

Those are amazing outcomes and as a book lover myself, of
course, I am thrilled when our core values can be represented so clearly as a
reader. Do you have any favorite leadership books or resources you’d like to
share, and why?

Well, I have to say I’m not necessarily a person who reads a
lot of nonfiction. But, I do think that Jim Collin’s books Good to Great, and in particular Good to Great for the Social Sector, that’s kind of a must read for
people in our profession. Because he puts a model forward that is accessible
for libraries to deliver, so we won’t be overwhelmed by our own organization or
bureaucracy, but instead, we can recognize how every individual can make a
contribution to moving that flywheel to changing the culture.

I love what you said before about how our initiative
permeated every level of the organization because we make small changes. We
were, in the past, in the sense that we said, Talking about books was a job for librarians. But, talking about
books is a job for everyone who works in the library. We took away that barrier
of people recommending a book at checkout or people recommending a book while
they were shelving books. If a member of the public asks you for a suggestion
and you can make a suggestion from our collections, by all means, do it. I
think that our attitude, that was much more open and positive, really helps
staff to get excited about this initiative.

If we look at the trend toward the public actually reviewing
on Amazon and Goodreads, how can we say that only experts can be involved in
recommending? I take lots of recommendations from people who work at the
library, but I also take recommendations from my best friends, because they
know me. We have a much more inclusive practice around readers of libraries
than we’ve had in the past.

I am a very eclectic reader, and I just read Lethal White, which is the J. K. Rowling
book, writing as Robert Galbraith. I’m about halfway through She Would Be King, I think I’m
pronouncing it correctly, by Wayétu Moore, and is a book about the creation of
Liberia. I love to read established authors, and new authors, and authors that
I might potentially meet.

We just were very, very lucky to have John Grisham come to
Cuyahoga County Public Library for one of our author’s fundraising events.
Meeting him had always been on my bucket list because he’s one of the most
popular U.S. authors of all time. I wanted to, maybe, better understand the
secret sauce that creates a John Grisham. I knew also that members of our
foundation and our community would be so excited to meet him as well.

We’re always trying to think of new ways of connecting with
readers. I might just take another minute, I’ll tell you that when we were
replacing our branches, one of the ideas that we had was to put a writing
center into one of our new buildings. In 2015, we opened a branch that has the
William N. Skirball Writers’ Center. We have a space, and staff that support
aspiring, and professional writers in pursuit of their craft.

Interestingly enough, we’ve discovered that through that
initiative we’re creating and encouraging readers. Now we have a Writer in
Residence as part of that. We’ve just announced our third Writer in Residence,
David Giffels. He’s a nonfiction memoirist.
That person will have office hours at the library, teach classes, and
we’ll obviously encourage writing. But, at the end of the day, they encourage
reading. I think the more libraries are connected to a larger community of
people who love literature, who are committed to literature, the better
positioned we are to foster that environment of reading.

We also put a Memory Lab into that library and we are
helping people to digitize their old movies or their audiotapes. What we’ve
discovered is that we have a growing group of people reading and writing
personal memoirs, as part of their process. One of our Writers in Residence is
a poet. Dave Lucas, who’s now the poet laureate of Ohio. He collected podcasts
of local writers reading their work and created a collection for us during his
residency.

So, there’s so much that’s happening. It always comes back
to the written word, but there is so much that can be happening and taking
advantage of the new technologies. We never deny the excitement and the value,
but we want to make sure that at the core of Cuyahoga County Public Library is
reading.

I think I said before the idea that we create individual
opportunity and community progress. I love the fact that we are an institution
with open doors that meet people at those doors, and welcome each individual
into our environment or through our website and create the opportunity that
that person needs.

We have tools, and resources, and books, and information
that can solve peoples’ problems, and help them get ahead, entertain them. But,
it is up to the individual. We couldn’t be a more customer-focused institution.
Every day I’m reminded of how important libraries are to our communities.

Libraries as open and welcoming places for everyone, it’s a
great way to see the profession. Sari Feldman, thank you for all you do to set
the tone in our library world. You’re an amazing and inspiring leader, and I am
so grateful you joined me on the show today.

You’ve been listening to Library Leadership Podcast. I’m
your host, Adrian Herrick Juarez. Our producer is Nate Vineyard. More episodes
can be found at libraryleadershippodcast.com,
where you can now subscribe to have new shows delivered right into your email
inbox. You can also find the show on Apple iTunes, or wherever you get your
podcasts. Thank you for listening. We’ll see you next time.

Why We Burned Our First Leadership Book, or How to Develop a Leadership Path that Holds Personal Meaning

Presenter: Adriane Herrick Jaurez

Co-Presenter : Becca Lael – Park City Library

Utah Library Association Conference

Thursday, May 16, 1:30-2:20pm

Mountain America Expo Center

How can we develop a leadership path that holds personal meaning? Inspired by interviews from the Library Leadership Podcast, a variety of strategic insights will show us how everyone can improve their leadership to personally shape their workplace, the community they serve, and the trajectory of the library profession. Attendees will learn how one library manager’s leadership path was transformed to include personal meaning, resulting in braver development.

Commencement Speaker for the Graduation of the Utah State Regional Master of Library Science ProgramFriday, January 5, 7:00pm Viridian Event Center I will be giving a commencement speech for the graduating class of Cohort 12.

Utah State History Conference
October 10th– 11th, 2017 Rio Grande Depot, 300 S. Rio Grande Street, Salt Lake City, UT Honoring the Past, Moving Into the Future: The Renovation of the Historic Park City Library that Developed a Dynamic 21st Century Library while Achieving National Historic Register Designation.

Nevada/Mountain Plains Library Association Joint ConferenceOctober 16th – 18th, 2017 Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, 50 US-50, Stateline, NV89449
Lightning-round presentation on how The Park City Library recently underwent a $9.6M library renovation that included the creation of a media lab that included a sound booth, green screen, film equipment, and other high tech amenities to foster independent media production in a ‘film-centric’ mountain town that is accessible to everyone, not just movie producers.